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Brief description: Domenico Scarlatti was born in Naples on October 26, 1685, the sixth of ten children of Alessandro Scarlatti. He shares his birth year with Johann Sebastian Bach and Georg Friedrich Händel. His first teachers were probably members of the large Scarlatti family, and his musical talents deverloped so quickly that at the age of fifteen he was emplyed as an organist at the Royal Chapel in Naples, with a special additional payment for the post of clevicembalista di camera.

In the summer of 1702 his father was asked to compose an opera for the Medici court. He took Domenico with him to Florence. There Domenico certainly became acquainted with Bartolomeo Cristoforo, the ingenious inventor of the first piano with a reliable action, and evidently learned to play this new cimbalo con piano e forte, whose idiomatic touch - as Maffei pionted out in 1711 - was not easy for an organist and harpsichordist. He is likely to have himself supervised the copying out of his sonatas, which may have been done by his former pupil, Antonio Soler. He died in Madrid on July 23, 1757.

Scarlatti's 555 keyboard sonatas are single movements, mostly in binary form, and are almost all intended for the harpsichord (there are four for organ, and a few where Scarlatti suggests a small instrumental group). Some of them display harmonic audacity in their use of discords, and also unconventional modulations to remote keys. Other distinctive attributes of Scarlatti's style are the following: The influence of Iberian (Portuguese and Spanish) folk music. An example is Scarlatti's use of the Phrygian mode and other tonal inflections more or less alien to European art music. Also some of Scarlatti's figurations and dissonances are guitar-like.
A formal device in which each half of a sonata leads to a pivotal point, which the Scarlatti scholar Ralph Kirkpatrick termed "the crux", and which is sometimes underlined by a pause or fermata. Before the crux, Scarlatti sonatas often contain their main thematic variety, and after the crux the music makes more use of repetitive figurations as it modulates away from the home key (in the first half) or back to the home key (in the second half).

".... Grante plays a heavenly Bösendorfer (on loan from Eva and Paul Badura-Skoda) and his approach to the music is thoroughly pianistic. The tone is almost always singing and expressive, with a phenomenal range of tonal variety and refreshingly heartfelt sentiment. Grante gives me hope for the future of baroque and early classical performance...you will find Grante’s collection an almost limitless source of new discoveries and pleasures ...." (American Record Guide)

Carlo Grante is one of the most active and accomplished performing and recording artists of his generation. He was recently featured in the successful monograph "Roberta Piana incontra Carlo Grante," first of a series devoted to major musical figures of Italy.

Read also the interview with Carlo Grante in Bösendorfer Magazine Nr. 5: http://magazine.boesendorfer.com/2010-01.html

Brief description: This is the second volume of Music & Arts' complete Scarlatti project performed by Carlo Grante.

The recordings of all of Scarlatti s sonatas, eloquently played on the Bösendorfer Imperial piano by Carlo Grante, is a splendid and fascinating undertaking: a journey through shared cultural experience, as well as one that explores the subtle thought processes of a highly influential musical genius.

Once finished, the Music & Arts project will be the only complete edition of Scarlatti's Sonatas played on the piano by a single performer.

Carlo Grante's discography includes more than thirty titles, including works by Platti, Clementi, Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Chopin and Prokofiev. He has been recording the complete solo piano works of Leopold Godowsky for Music & Arts (including the 53 Studies on the Etudes of Chopin and transcriptions of Schubert and J.S. Bach). 2009 Carlo Grante released Volume I of his ambitious project to record all 555 Scarlatti keyboard sonatas. 2011 Volume III will follow.

Read also the interview with Carlo Grante in Bösendorfer Magazine Nr. 5: http://magazine.boesendorfer.com/2010-01.html